1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to filtering electronic content. In particular, the present invention relates to systems and methods for using a print subsystem to implement an analysis of the content of a print job prior to despooling the print job to a printing device, and selectively rendering, providing a modified rendering or terminating the print job.
2. Background and Related Art
The filtering of electronic content has proven to be beneficial for families and businesses. Today, content filtering of electronic data is utilized in both electronic mail systems and web browsers to eliminate unwanted and/or inappropriate content. For example, in corporate environments it is common for email messages to be automatically analyzed at the corporate email server for inappropriate content (e.g., pornography, gambling, trade secrets, etc.) prior to a delivery of the message to the end user. Typically, the analysis is limited to keyword searching. In one technique, a message is flagged when a keyword is discovered within the message and is manually analyzed by an administrator to determine the appropriateness of the message.
In another technique, the email analysis is performed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), where each email message is searched for keywords that can be executed as JavaScript. Currently, senders of email correspondence have used keywords to cause actions to occur on the receiver's computer if the receiver is running JavaScript. The technique replaces the JavaScript keywords with semantically equivalent keywords that do not change the meaning of the message.
In another technique, attachments of email messages are analyzed for any executing code that is known to be a virus. When detected, the messages are rejected to prevent delivery to the receiver. The Norton® AntiVirus software is an example of such a technique.
Other techniques relate to filtering content of web pages. For example, one such technique is especially tuned to analysis of electronic images and/or text, using neural network technologies. The neural networks are trained by input examples/non-examples to recognize such things as flesh tones of nude images. This technique utilizes a proxy server. When the user makes a request for a web page, the request is sent to a proxy server, which then pulls the page from the source site. Prior to forwarding the web page contents to the user, software running on the proxy server analyzes the content of the web page. If the content is clean or otherwise appropriate, the web page is forwarded to the user. If the content is flagged as possibly inappropriate, the user is notified and the page is not sent. The system can be configured so that the user can override the page not being sent by manually invoking a send anyways button when the user is notified that the content was flagged. In this case, the web page is forwarded to the user and a copy of the page or URL is logged.
Thus, while techniques currently exist that are used to filter electronic content, challenges still exist in ensuring that inappropriate content is not being rendered. And, while improvements in blocking inappropriate content are continually being developed, the techniques are only available for use in association with filtering electronic content in communicating systems (e.g., email systems and web browsers) used between users and/or sites. Accordingly, it would be an improvement in the art to augment or even replace current techniques with other techniques to restrict and/or eliminate inappropriate content.